The Best Movie About RPGs in 2018 (So Far)

There's been plenty of talk about the future of movies inspired by tabletop games, but the end of 2017 brought a surprise: a movie about a game that doesn't exist. Although it uses video game tropes, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a lot to say about role-playing games. If you haven't seen the movie, this discussion contains SPOILERS.

[h=3]"Many Effects"[/h]The concept behind Jumanji was established in a children's book by Chris Van Allsburg: kids play a board game and the game's effects seep into real life. Jumanji was a jungle-themed game where the players would face increasingly hostile animals and characters.

The book was the inspiration for the movie of the same name, starring Robin Williams as Alan Parrish, a boy trapped in the game for over 26 years before Judy and Peter Shepherd unwittingly release him. Like the book, it featured animals and a big game hunter named Van Pelt. Williams mentioned that the name of the game was actually the Zulu word for "many effects," but that's more speculation than fact (some supposedly Zulu speakers have contradicted this claim).

The most recent film, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, is less a sequel and more a reimagining, with a character similar to Parrish trapped in the game, Alex Vreeke. Before he is sucked into the game, Vreeke rejects it with a sneer, saying, "who plays board games anymore?" In a sign of the changing times, Jumanji refashions itself as a video game -- but despite its video game roots, this new version of Jumanji is a lot like a role-playing game.
[h=3]Welcome to the Jungle[/h]The protagonists are four archetypes established by The Breakfast Club: the brain (Alex Wolff as Spencer Gilpin), the athlete (Ser'Darius Blain as Anthony "Fridge" Johnson), the basket case (Morgan Turner as Martha Kaply), and the social media-obsessed princess (Madison Iseman as Bethany Walker). They're in detention for a variety of reasons, which turns into an exercise in recycling magazines by removing staples. It also just happens to have the video game version of Jumanji, which of course our four hapless teens decide to play. That's when the fun really starts.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is as much a deconstruction of poor game design as it is a takedown of high school tropes. Spencer's avatar is Dr. Smolder Bravestone the archaeologist (Dawyne Johnson, intentionally playing against type as Spencer's nebbish germaphobe). Fridge picks Franklin "Mouse" Finbar the zoologist (Kevin Hart), because he misread his name as "Moose." Mouse is slow, weak, and vulnerable to cake, but he carries the backpack for our hero -- an inverse of Fridge and Spencer's relationship, in which Spencer does Fridge's homework for him. Martha ends up as Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), a redheaded "dance fighter" who wears skimpy outfits. Most hilarious of all is poor Bethany, who is transposed into the "curvy genius," Professor "Shelly" Oberon (Jack Black).

Jumanji goes beyond mocking video games into what it means to role-play someone else who is radically different from you. Each character has three lives, which means that the players take more risks early on and become more cautious as the game progresses. At heart Jumanji wrestles with what Live-Action Role-Players (LARPers) call "bleed".
[h=3]Bleeding Out[/h]LARP scholar Sarah Lynne Bowman explains what bleed is in the context of role-playing:

Participants often engage in role-playing in order to step inside the shoes of another person in a fictional reality that they consider “consequence-free.” However, role-players sometimes experience moments where their real life feelings, thoughts, relationships, and physical states spill over into their characters’ and vice versa. In role-playing studies, we call this phenomenon bleed.


Bowman classifies bleed in two forms: bleed-in, in which feelings of the player affect the character; and bleed-out in which events in the game affect the player. Bleed-in is the source of much humor in Jumanji, where the strong are now the weak, the weak now the strong, and females are now males. The players discover that they must rely on other strengths than the archetypes associated with them (strong, attractive, smart). In doing so, the characters help their players grow emotionally: Spencer learns to be brave, Fridge learns to be a team player, Martha becomes more confident and Bethany learns to sacrifice for others.

Although Jumanji is nominally about video games, it emphasizes teamwork as necessary to survival. Co-creator of D&D, Gary Gygax, would agree:

The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience. There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.


In Jumanji, the only way the players can succeed is by working together. It's a lesson we can only hope the upcoming D&D film will feature prominently.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.
 

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Michael Tresca

Michael Tresca

The Hobbit trilogy are easily some of the worst films I’ve ever seen. They rank just above the Star Wars prequels and slightly below Robot Jox


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The Hobbit trilogy are easily some of the worst films I’ve ever seen. They rank just above the Star Wars prequels and slightly below Robot Jox

And they are all better than that Warcraft movie and at least half of all fantasy movies ever made. lol

But more seriously, there was enough material in there to make two good movies, rather than the stretched thin three that were made, both for The Hobbit and the Star Wars prequels.
 

Missed this discussion (spend most of my time in the 5e forum), but pleasantly surprised to see this movie is still holding strong. I thought this should be a good example of what the D&D movie should aim for. It’ll be very lucky if sees this kind of success. The word of mouth is very strong, which is exactly what the D&D movie needs to overcome the low expectations the prior movies have established.
 



The Hobbit trilogy are easily some of the worst films I’ve ever seen. They rank just above the Star Wars prequels and slightly below Robot Jox

I didn't think the Hobbit movies were really good, but they were at least competently made. I think a comparison with the Star Wars prequels is not just undeserved, but they make the Hobbit movies look like pieces of art.

If you believe they are that bad, then you have probably not seen a whole lot of truly bad movies. Just sit down and try to watch Road to Hell, and you'll develop a whole new appreciation for Peter Jackson's bloated CGI-fest-trilogy. Say what you will, but at least Peter bothered to switch on a fan every now and then during his green screen shenanigans.

I'm still awaiting the super-special BluRay edition where they edit out all the excess crap & just show me The Hobbit.

There's several fan-edits that cut the trilogy down to 2, or even just 1 movie. They cut out all the fan service and cameos, which makes the movie so much better.
 
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I take it you've never read the Hobbit.
Because most of the problems come from greed. They took a one-and-done 90some page story & stretched it into a trilogy of movies that mandated inventing at least 6hrs of additional content.

I'm still awaiting the super-special BluRay edition where they edit out all the excess crap & just show me The Hobbit.
I have read the Hobbit.

Yes, they stretched it out, but it wouldn't have been stretched out in the manner if del Toro was still there - he had already outlined his two movie outline in interviews. It would have added a few things, but would have generally been a lot leaner. Jackson and co., when left to do the movie alone, under relatively short notice, simply tried to repeat the scripting formula they laid out with LotR, and integrated footnotes and backstory to beef out The Hobbit story. Their attempts were flawed but it wasn't anything to do with greed. It was more a case of fanboys getting out of hand with the material being worked with. They needed an outside influence to get strict with it.
 
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There's several fan-edits that cut the trilogy down to 2, or even just 1 movie. They cut out all the fan service and cameos, which makes the movie so much better.

But I'm not going to watch multiple versions to find wich one did it best.
 


I have read the Hobbit.

Yes, they stretched it out, but it wouldn't have been stretched out in the manner if del Toro was still there - he had already outlined his two movie outline in interviews. It would have added a few things, but would have generally been a lot leaner. Jackson and co., when left to do the movie alone, under relatively short notice, simply tried to repeat the scripting formula they laid out with LotR, and integrated footnotes and backstory to beef out The Hobbit story. Their attempts were flawed but it wasn't anything to do with greed. It was more a case of fanboys getting out of hand with the material being worked with. They needed an outside influence to get strict with it.
My biggest criticism is how they ended the second movie in the middle of a fight with Smaug, and then finished him off at the beginning of the Third Movie, and the rest of the Movie was of five armies fighting over the Dragon's treasure. Usually in a Dungeons and Dragons adventure, what happens after the party defeats the dragon is a bit anticlimactic. Its fine if you are watching all three movies at home one after another, but if you just bought movie tickets and you are watching the movie in a theater, it kind of sucks!
 

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